NACER CHERNOUF, SAMI BOUJILA IN OMAR KILLED ME

Injustice to an Arab in a French court

Omar Killed Me/Omar m'a tuer is a good but not great film about a familiar theme: a man framed for a crime he didn't commit, whom people struggle to exonerate. There is an angle of class and racism because the man rushed to a conviction in a French court is a poor Moroccan immigrant, illiterate in Arabic as well as French and hardly able to speak or understand French. The most vivid message is how helpless an inarticulate person must necessarily be in a courtroom, despite in this case having famous lawyerrs. He is put away for the murder of a wealthy widow for whom he worked as a gardener. The veteran French actor Roschdy Zem, himself the son of Moroccan immigrants, chose this theme for his very creditable, but not dazzling directorial debut. One can see why he chose this subject, but one wishes he had waited for something better. Sami Boujila, another big French actor of Arab descent (in his case Tunisian) plays the role of Omar Raddad, the protagonist with great understated power. The costar is the ubiquitous Comédie Française star Denis Podalydès, cast as the slightly oddball writer Pierre-Emmanuel Vaugrenard, who does a muckraking book about the case that helps get Omar early release from prison -- though he has still not been proven innocent, because the court won't allow the case to be reopened. DNA checks might exonerate him, as it has US death row prisoners in recent decades. It's a story that does not end with a bang.

There is something iconic about Sami Boujila in this film, with his erect posture, his pompadour, his broad-shouldered, cheap suit jacket, his blank, stoical stare. The challenge of the role is that Omar Raddad isn't initially at all an interesting character. He's quite inarticulate in French at first, and tight-lipped in Arabic too. He emerges slowly. So does the case, and its secrets never come out. Yes, it's obvious that Omar isn't proven guilty. The blood-message, "Omar m'a tuer," in ungrammatical, probably written by a strong, untutored murderer rather than the wealthy, well-read lady victim. No fingerprints were taken; there is no real forensic evidence. The murdered woman was inexplicably cremated (probably against her wishes) so further investigation of the murder could not be done -- and so on.

As we would expect, Zem's gets good performances. Boujila is quietly charismatic. Raddad's torments and his desperation in prison, his relations with his father and his family during visits and on his release, provide the main human interest. Vaugrenard is a mildly interesting character, with individual touches, including relations with his working-class girl assistant (Salome Stevenin) that have an edge: but this is a sideshow. The lawyers are important in getting Raddad's pardon too, but they don't get in-depth treatment. The main one, Maitre Verges (Maurice Benichou), one of France's most famous defense lawyers, hardly needs filling out here since his work was examined in Barbet Schroeder documentary Terror's Advocate.

There are lively courtroom scenes. But the weakness is that the effort to prove Omar innocent isn't made suspenseful enouugh. The story itself has this weakness: that Raddad has not been provben innocent, so there's no final payoff, like the accuser's draw-dropping court recantation in another current French miscarriage of justice film, Vincent Garenq's Guilty (Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2012). Omar Killed Me feels like a great story -- only it's not quite. Zem's "pacing of a thriller" doesn't quite work because this isn't quite a thriller. It's muddled. The film approaches Omar with total empathy, but the failure to prove his innocence conclusively spoils the story of injustice. And the empathy clouds the sense of a mystery to unravel.

A collaborator on the screenplay was Rachid Bouchareb, who co-wrote and direced all the big French-Arab movie actors in Indigènes/AKA/Days of Glory, the 2006 film about the Arabs who fought for France in WWII. The film is based on several books, including Omar Raddad's memoir, Pourquoi moi? (Why Me?). The many cooks did not enhance the broth.

Omar Killed Me opened in France June 22, 2011, to good review (Allociné 3.3); however some key publications, Le Monde, Libération, Télérama, Cahiers du Cinéma, Les Inrockuptibles, were less favorable. It has been in several festivals, including Toronto and Glasgow.

Omar m'a tuer (85min.) is included in the 2012 MoMA-Lincoln Center New Directors/New Films series shown as follows:


Saturday, March 24th 2012 | 6:45 PM | FSLC
Sunday, March 25th 2012 | 7:30 PM | MoMA

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.